Hi guys I never learned to swim as a child, and I’ve signed up for adult swim lessons soon. Something I think will help me prepare for the lessons is I don’t know the mechanics/physics behind the motion. So I’m asking
1.) how do people float in water and why is it crucial to swimming?
2.) how do people actually move from point a to b in water while swimming?
EDIT: thanks so much to all who have responded with answers, tips, advice, and encouragement! Trying to read through all your helpful answers ☺️
In: 715
You just kind of float naturally. If you pull your legs to your chest and curl yourself into a ball, you’ll float to the surface, with your back poking out making you look like an egg in a bowl of water. If you lie on your back with your arms and legs spread out like a star, you’ll just lie there with your face and belly poking out of the water.
Floating is crucial for two reasons: One, your lungs still need air, and the surface is where all the air is. Two, all the effort you spend pushing yourself up to the surface is effort you could’ve been spending propelling yourself forward instead. Sort of how you get more tired from skipping and hopping than you would walking the same distance.
As for how you move around in the water, imagine crawling on the floor at home. You just use your arms and legts to pull/push yourself forward. Now imagine crawling on loose sand. You still use your arms and legts to pull/push yourself forward, just the same as if you did on a solid floor, but now the sand moves with you a bit so you have worse traction than you would on a firmer surface.
Swimming is basically that same thing except water moves around even more than sand. In fact, the style of swimming that you might have seen called “freestyle” is actually called the front crawl (It’s just that it’s the fastest swimming style so it’s the one everybody uses in a _freestyle competition_).
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